


maternal instinct

by casualbird



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Marriage of Convenience, Motherhood, Pre-Canon, Privilege, Unplanned Pregnancy, rated for implied sexual content and Zoldyck Family Nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 07:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26469508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: A slowly avalanchingforce majeureover her head, over the head of the child she swore would come.It could be, she knew, for better or worse.Kikyou, eighteen, prepares for the birth of her first child.
Relationships: Kikyou Zoldyck/Silva Zoldyck
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42





	maternal instinct

**Author's Note:**

> i didn't understand anything about kikyou until i checked the wiki and learned three facts:
> 
> 1\. she is from meteor city  
> 2\. she is canonically frighteningly underweight  
> 3\. illumi was born when she was 18 years old
> 
> and then i felt like i understood everything. here's my view on what the hell is going on with this dreadful harpy woman.

When Kamiya Kikyou wrenched Silva Zoldyck’s wrist and hissed that she was _pregnant,_ she wasn’t entirely sure. Not of that, not in full. Just that it’d been six weeks since she met him, when they’d both been hired on the life of one man. Since he’d decided she looked lovely, lithe and decisive and dripping with blood. Since she’d decided more or less the same of him, and they’d committed a disappointing indiscretion together in the back of Silva’s car.

She’d felt it since. Not an offness, not the horror-storied illness that she’d heard of. But with the shedding of her body’s wax and wane came a wax, wax, wax that felt inexorable. It was an instinct deeper than aura, than the street sense one picked up from a life in Meteor City. A slowly avalanching _force majeure,_ over her head, over the head of the child she swore would come.

It could be, she knew, for better or worse.

Kikyou decided that it was going to be better, and she was rather in the habit of having her way. It took her just days to hunt Silva down, to dig in her claws and _demand,_ potent and dangerous as strychnine. He married her within the month, whisked her off to a fortress at the top of the world, carried her bridal through the testing gates.

At first, the luxury disgusted her. Kikyou, who grew up on scraps, who tasted real food only when she could cut a purse for it, in a velvelt-brocade-dour place like this? With its long dark hallways, festering with portraits, generations of stoic-faced Zoldycks who never had anything to worry about. She would scoff under her breath--the gravity rang hollow.

Her husband was a bright spot, _usually._ Though he doted so casually on her, swore he didn’t marry her just to _do the right thing,_ he was… She had no better word for it than foolish, as if he still sucked the silver spoon that’d been born into his mouth. Silva liked that he could fit his hands around her waist, at first, and it was all she could do not to screech at him, to gnash those fingers off. As if he didn’t know _why_ she was so waifish.

Eventually, though, when she’d had enough morning walks in immaculate gardens, enough rich food that it no longer turned her stomach; with the discovery of the way she looked in silks, she morphed into it. Adapted, like any assassin should.

That wasn’t it, though, not really. Only the satiny bow it came wrapped in. The real draw of it found her in the silent cradle of the night, when she’d curl in an heirloom rocking chair, palms shielding her abdomen.

This house--this _complex,_ this opulent affair--wasn’t the shanty she’d come up in, where she’d wake before dawn to find no sign of anything she’d scrounged, squirreled away. Wasn’t the city whose streets she’d shadowed like a pariah dog, snuffling for some rind of a handout. The money in her purse, the clothes on her back, the food on her plate had become unconditional.

Kikyou’s child, lively kicking thing it was, wouldn’t starve. Wouldn’t bow its head in the street, wouldn’t cower. Wouldn’t _fear._

Life, Kikyou had learned early, wasn’t fair. This was as much a precept as the laws of gravity, inertia, and no amount of harpy-howling would change it. By this point she’d sloughed off what parts of her would ever have wanted to, regardless.

Her only course of action was to tip the scale as far as she could in her child’s favor, hew the foundation of their life from solid granite. She’d already come most of the way.

By the time her Illumi was born, the week before her nineteenth birthday, she was as ready as such a young mother could be. She had a nursery draped in fine dark muslin, a pediatrician on call. The first blushes of a curriculum that would make him more than she’d ever been, more than _anyone._

Had her bright-eyed boy, whom she would make deadly strong, vicious, _untouchable._

When he’d weep (and oh, he wept,) she would clutch him, safe in that same rocking chair, and whisper. All her plans for him, all the places she’d been that he never would. Over and over and over, that there was truly _nothing_ for him to cry about.

Not as long as she had anything to say about it.

**Author's Note:**

> hello again! thank you for reading--i really don't expect a piece like this to gain much traction, so i'm glad you're here! if you like, let me know how you felt about this piece, and perhaps join me on [twitter (18+)](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles) or my shiny new [hxh discord!](https://discord.gg/xVSBWPs) i'd love to find some more hxh pals :^>
> 
> have a good one!


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